Jeffrey Masson's version of the seduction theory episode in Freud's early career, as presented in The Assault on Truth (1984), is very plaus ible as a revised account of the traditional story. However, close examination of the seduction theory papers and of other contemporary documents reveals that Freud's later reports of the episode, the foun dation on which Masson builds his case, are false. Some purported his torical events that Masson uses to buttress his case are also shown to be (...) without foundation. The several accounts of the episode Freud gave in his writings are dissected to demonstrate that they are tendentiously misleading and serve to conceal what actually occurred with his patients during the period in question. Some consequences of the widespread acceptance of the traditional account are briefly discussed. (shrink)

Jeffrey Masson's version of the seduction theory episode in Freud's early career, as presented in The Assault on Truth, is very plaus ible as a revised account of the traditional story. However, close examination of the seduction theory papers and of other contemporary documents reveals that Freud's later reports of the episode, the foun dation on which Masson builds his case, are false. Some purported his torical events that Masson uses to buttress his case are also shown to be without (...) foundation. The several accounts of the episode Freud gave in his writings are dissected to demonstrate that they are tendentiously misleading and serve to conceal what actually occurred with his patients during the period in question. Some consequences of the widespread acceptance of the traditional account are briefly discussed. (shrink)

The disputed issues that comprise the recovered memories controversy are so important that they deserve the most careful and intellectually honest scholarship that the academic and professional community can muster. Drawing partly on illustrative material from the recentHealth Care Analysis paper by Goodyear-Smithet al. and associated commentaries, it is argued that the controversy is not being well served. The rules of scholarship are too often broken, with the result that the products are often superficial, containing what should have been readily (...) avoided factual errors, and are sometimes even misleading. (shrink)

Grünbaum characterizes the foundations of psychoanalysis as consisting primarily of two assertions ? (1) only psychoanalysis can give correct insight into the unconscious causes of neurosis, and (2) only such correct insight can cure neurosis. Grünbaum infers from these that therapeutic success is the only evidence of the correctness of psychoanalytic theories. It is obvious that the two passages in Freud on which Grünbaum relies do not justify his interpretation. Furthermore, Freud thought of therapeutic success as by no means the (...) only kind of relevant and available evidence for psychoanalytic theory. In a discussion of Grünbaum's critique of Freud's theory concerning the causation of slips of the tongue, it is argued that Grünbaum is committed to mistaken views on the nature of causation in psychology and wholly neglects the important role of analogical thinking not only in psychology but in science generally. (shrink)

We present an inference to the best explanation of the immense cultural success of Freudian psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic method. We argue that an account of psychoanalytic facts as products of unintended declarative speech acts explains this phenomenon. Our argument connects diverse, seemingly independent characteristics of psychoanalysis that have been independently confirmed, and applies key features of John Searle’s and Eerik Lagerspetz’s theory of institutional facts to the psychoanalytic edifice. We conclude with a brief defence of the institutional approach against (...) more contentious social constructivist approaches to science and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

In this paper I consider contemporary expressions of what Freud called the primal crime and collapse of paternal law through an exploration of the cinema of the Danish-American Director Nicolas Winding Refn. Introducing the paper I outline Freud’s theory of the law, crime, and civilization, where social order and its transgression become caught in an endless cycle, before moving on to explore Winding Refn’s cinema. Following this work, where I centrally show how Freud founds the law upon structures of the (...) family and criminality, I consider Winding Refn’s early Danish films, specifically the Pusher trilogy and Bleeder, in order to show how he imagines the collapse of law and order into crime and violence through stories of the ruined family. Moving on, I explore the consequences of this situation through reference to Winding Refn’s middle period films, Bronson and Valhalla Rising, where first crime completely dominates the law, and second this situation conjures the idea of escape from the dystopia of violence and crime into some other utopian space. Finally, I explore Winding Refn’s later works, Drive, Only God Forgives, and The Neon Demon. In these films Winding Refn imagines the ruins of the family and the oedipal law of the father who is no longer on the scene and tells the story of the desperate orphaned child who grows up without the socio-symbolic structures in place in tell them how to live. At this point Winding Refn’s crime system is more or less entirely normalised with the result that it generates the idea of utopian possibility in order to imagine potential escape from the nihilistic horror of an asocial system where exchange is everything. (shrink)

Adolf Grünbaum contends that he has discovered in Freud's writings a hitherto overlooked thesis (the Tally Argument), enunciated by Freud to underwrite his psychoanalytic method of clinical investigation. (The Foundations of Psycho analysis, 1984:127-72). He claims that until at least 1917, and possibly up to 1926, Freud invoked the unique efficacy of analytic therapy to vindicate the Freudian theory of personality, including the specific aetiologies of the psychoneuroses and the general theory of psychosexual development (Foun dations : 140-1). In this (...) article I shall argue (1) that the Tally Argument itself is defective, and (2) that Freud did not invoke it as Grünbaum claims. In short, I shall argue that Grünbaum's Tally Argument thesis is untenable and, as a corollary, that his depiction of Freud as a 'sophisticated scientific methodologist' is misconceived. (shrink)

A close study of Freud's use of the terms Trieb, Impuls, etc., allows an insight into Freud's sources of Inspiration, through which I interrogate the importance he gradually granted the concept of drive before 1905. Freud first tentatively introduced the notion of 'sexual drive forces', then developed the hypothesis of a 'communication drive'. There was much hesitancy in his defining the notion of sexual drive. He eventually adopted a concept widely used by psychiatrists at the time, which played a part (...) in the recurrence of an innate — then hereditary — theory in psychoanalysis. (shrink)

This essay undertakes a critique of recent trends in affect theory from the standpoint of the “human motor”: a trope that presupposes a thermodynamic psychophysiology distended between energy conservation and entropy. In the course of reanimating thermodynamic motifs in Marx's labor power metabolics and Freud's trauma energetics, the essay broaches entropics as a poetics of depletion that offsets affect theories promoting open-system metaphors. Open-system affect theory sometimes amalgamates emancipatory post-humanist gestures inherited from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari with neuroscientific terms. (...) In the course of “liberating” affect from subject-oriented topoi, this “liberation-scientistic” admixture expropriates organic matter's degeneration over time. An “entropical” perspective also challenges Antonio Negri's Spinozaist affect conceived as a capacitating power that encounters obstacles but never limits. Both “liberation scientism” and “capacitation rhetoric” mimic capital's abstraction in infinitely expanding its potential to extract surplus value from finitely embodied labor. With enervation and deterioration at its crux, entropics illuminates how people might feel individuated by their respective struggles to safeguard scarce energy and forestall “heat death” while navigating simultaneous demands. The question is whether or not open-system motifs in affect theory can effectively register the political force of this struggle with depletion and present or imminent debilitation as its common ground. (shrink)